Whipple's Castle (21 page)

But not like Carol Oakes, who sat two desks away, diagonally so he could see the rich curve and weight of her breast where it rested inside her fuzzy sweater, and the taut lean of her waist.

Think of something else, not of her thighs and the narrow waist leaning away above them, the miraculous strange swell of her hips around her dark secret entrance. Ten minutes till the bell would make him have to stand up and go to English class, and he'd better think of something else right away.

There was Ben Caswell, with his skinny blue-white face and thin, metal-colored hair, the brightest boy in school, his best friend and worst enemy, doing his work perfectly as always. John Cotter sat dark and silent, motionlessly reading, and ahead of him was Michael Spinelli, who always got caught no matter what he did, who had been kicked out of school as recently as last week, who was at this moment bored into a coma. His long legs protruded slackly under Kenny Clark's seat, and he stared blindly at the region of the door.

In the front row, where he had been placed for disciplinary reasons, big Junior Stevens, bully, stupe, occasional tormentor of Horace, sat growing bristles on the back of his red neck. He, like Mike Spinelli, never read, never did homework, never did anything in school that had to do with learning anything. Separated from Junior by the two necessary aisles was his lieutenant, Keith Joubert, whom David had once wrestled to the ground and anointed with half-frozen mud. That had been sheer necessity. When Keith and Junior got together they seemed to feel the need of a victim. Alone, they were polite enough. Their most famous mistake was the time they chose Ben Caswell, their theory being that the smartest and skinniest boy in school would be a pushover. Ben was rather frightening, as David could have told them from experience. Anyway, it was beautiful to watch Ben transform himself immediately into a pure murderous madman and butt Junior in the chin with his head. Junior bit his tongue, bled all over, vomited from trying to swallow his own blood, and couldn't talk plainly for a week. Thereafter they let Ben Caswell alone.

The bell. At the end of this long day, Christmas vacation would start. Now he could stand up without embarrassment, gather his English book and notebook and go toward another kind of boredom.

 

Horace had not expected to be afraid of the examination. He was absolutely certain that the doctors would be trying to help him, that they would not hate him at all, in any way. And so he was surprised and frightened by the shock he felt as he followed his mother into the small waiting room. He began to tremble. His palms sweat so badly he had to keep wiping them on his shirt. Cold drops of sweat crawled down his sides, and he couldn't do anything about it.

A nurse who didn't quite look like a nurse—she looked more like a secretary who wore white—asked them to sit down, and they sat side by side on a cold, slippery couch with chrome legs and arms. Next to Horace a fragile floor lamp of turned wood, and a glass-topped table, stood ready to break. He kept his elbows rigidly to his sides, but tremors still came shaking down his arms and into his wrists. At the dentist's or at the doctor's he had never been this incontrollably nervous, even when he had been in pain. Pain he knew; he had grown up with it. But now they would be near his brain, at his eyes themselves. His mother had told him that it never hurt at all when she got her glasses, but she had been slightly evasive about that. Her eyes had moved away from his as she spoke.

Perhaps she didn't really believe him about what he had been able to see all of a sudden through the little gold-rimmed glasses. He had so many secrets anyway, maybe he didn't deserve to be believed. He couldn't tell anyone about Leverah and Zoster, or about any of the events of his nights, and yet he thought of them more and more during the daylight. Once they had been like dreams, forgotten soon after breakfast, but more and more the events of his days receded into thoughts and preparations for what would happen in the night. Now he dreaded any lessening of his concentration upon that ordeal. The examination might upset his balance, somehow, so that they would know where he'd been and what he'd done; they might so skillfully use his eyes against him.

“Horace?” his mother said. The air reeked of an odor like hollowness, as though part of the air were gone, one of its chemical components breathed out of it. Neon, hydrogen, oxygen…

“Horace?” She took his arm in her gloved hands. “You're rigid,” she said. “You shouldn't be this nervous.”

“I can't stop being nervous,” he said.

“It's just an examination.”

“I know it,” he said. But he also knew that Leverah and Zoster were not real, and what good did that do? Reality was the shaking of his nerves, the stuttery little spasms in his arms. He would have to live through that first—except that he didn't ever see another side to it. There never seemed to be another shore. Wood's room was like an island inhabited by friends, but there was no far happy shore.

The nurse, or the woman in white—she wore white shoes and stockings too, but had a corsage of little blue flowers as big as blueberries pinned to her blouse—came out of the door to the inner place and asked them to come in, smiling too briefly. Horace went first. He felt all wet, and had to sit in his own damp in a chair as machinelike as a dentist's chair. The doctor, who was young and wore pinkish-rimmed glasses, sternly took his head and shoved it back against leather rests, just at the angle Horace knew would soon cause a pain in his neck. Immediately a muscle fought itself below his ear, and the pain began. When he tried to move, the doctor's hands tightened, and his face grew stem. His eyes seemed to be looking through Horace's head to the rests. The black holes where his whiskers grew turned in the hundreds oval, then round again.

“There,” the doctor said. But when he took his hands away, Horace's head moved with them. “Well,” the doctor said.

“Sit up straight, Horace,” his mother said anxiously.

“My neck hurts,” he said, feeling that he had no right to say it. For the moment his neck muscle did relax, and the feeling was sweet because he knew how short a time he had bought.

The doctor pushed his head back against the rests. “Now, is that better?”

The muscle coiled again, and he looked to his mother. “I don't know
why
it hurts!”

“Well we've got to find some sort of steady position,” the doctor said, “so we can get on with the examination.”

The doctor moved the rests forward. Horace hoped as hard as he could that the muscle would stop fighting, and this embarrassment would end. The doctor seemed by his impatience to think it was his fault, but he couldn't tell the doctor that he was all different parts—made of all different parts that did as they wanted, not as he wanted. Deep in the flesh and bone of his head, he had his own self with its reasonable desires, who desired to please and to make his mother calm. And for the moment, at least, nothing fought him openly. The doctor's face faded from Horace's left eye, and in his right all grew down into a tiny orange light. He looked out of his brain into the dark cave of his eyeball, through that tunnel into the little orange light that flickered like a weak flashlight in a basement, peering around in that cobwebby cave as though the doctor, grown small as a little boy, were lost and apprehensive in there.

Then the light withdrew into daylight, and appeared, wavery and dim, at the tunnel of his other eye. After it had examined this entrance to his head, its flickering withdrew and the room came back clearly, though it had never quite gone out of sight. Its shapes and colors had hovered transparently before him all the time. One shape was now the doctor, who pivoted on his stool and moved a black machine around in front. Horace had noticed this complexity of black metal because it was attached to the chair, ready to work on whoever sat in the chair. As it came toward him he saw that it had a face of its own, black as an ape's, with staring, yet curiously impersonal frosted eyes. The doctor, or it—some confident smooth force—moved the black face toward his own, too close for any face to be until it actually pressed against his own, and pressed as it disappeared and became two frosted eyes against his eyes, his head against the rests in back so that he was its absolute prisoner.

He stared out through those other eyes, not his, and his flesh blended into its coldness—metal, but curved like a face inside out, not ungentle in its curves, but strong. Then he was it, and saw what it saw.

At first it was like looking down two gun barrels, except the rifling was a series of disks rather than a long spiral. With a smooth click the left eye went blank. Only the right was allowed to see, and at first it didn't really see, but was allowed only white light. Then came another click, and a knife-bright chart appeared. The doctor's voice asked him, through the machine, to read the letters of the chart. With sudden pride he read them all, his voice clear, not quite his—it came from below but was his voice, clearly and authoritatively reading the tiniest letters in the very bottom line.

The charts changed at the whim of the machine, became green and red, then changed and became tiny games with lines and colors, games he repeatedly solved with either eye. The machine helped him each time, and he grew calm behind it, or in it, or of it. It protected him, and grew warm. When it swung away, suddenly, its mass and warmth gone away, his own face was damply cold and naked, almost as if it had been skinned.

“Now I'm going to put a little drop of this in each eye,” the doctor said. He reached for a little eyedropper, and held it out like a magician, to prove that it was only what it seemed.

“What is it?” Horace asked.

“It's an eyedropper.”

“I mean, what's in it?” A twinge of insult; he was not that stupid.

“It's an anesthetic. It's so you won't feel it when I test the pressure.”

The bald statement froze him. “What pressure?”

“Horace,” his mother said.

The doctor turned to her as though he'd given up trying to explain anything to someone as unreasonable as Horace. “It's just the standard test for glaucoma. A routine thing.” He turned to Horace again. “I just put a little gauge against your eye—just for a moment, and it tells me if the pressure's normal or not. Okay?”

“What can I do about it?” Horace heard himself say. The doctor was startled, and so was he, but he could think of no way to apologize. He had done so well on the little visual games in the machine—he ought to get some credit for that.

“It won't hurt a bit,” the doctor said.

Now, Horace thought, they are getting down to business. When they said that, they always got down to business.

On his right, past the black machine, was a small window surrounded by metal cabinets. Outside, the winter day was dim and cold. He shook as though he had been forced to lie naked on that crusted ice and snow. He could feel the crust cutting his skin, and the doctor's cold intentions gathering toward him. Stop it, he asked his shaking. This was fear without source, because there was no Leverah at that window, nothing, and probably it wouldn't hurt. But it hurt already, somewhere in the middle of his bones, because he was about to explode. What, exactly, am I afraid of? he asked himself. Where would I rather be? I couldn't even run to get there. I would stumble and let go of everything like a sick dog—like Unk when the car hit him on Bank Street.

Now was the time of no other choice. When he'd stepped on a nail, Dr. Winston had to ream out the hole in his foot. That had hurt! And when the time had come to clean that nail hole, nothing else would do. It was the time, like all those other times that never seemed to end, but to be repeated in all sorts of varieties; like when it was necessary to set the ulna in his arm, or to put his dislocated finger back straight, or when his shoulder was dislocated, or when he pulled the tendons in his knee and it swelled up big as a cantaloupe, and it had to be moved in examination, or when the dentist said this would hurt a little bit. His parts did stupid things, went wrong all the time, and he paid in fear.

“All right,” he said. But it was not just personal fear, either. He was afraid of what might be done by that doctor to that boy, just as he feared the moment the car hit Unk and threw his brown and white body down the sidewalk, his big spaniel ears flying. The sound of that blow. He heard the breath go like an ear popping, and the dog couldn't breathe to scream. That was nothing; it happened all the time. Men did worse things to men, to women and to little children. David shot bullets through the bodies of squirrels, and they kicked and kicked, unable to climb. In what pain. Gordon Ward and his big men, raping Susie on the grass, common as a toilet. None of them ever seemed to fear another's pain or fear. Never. They had appetites like the Herpes, all of them, until they had to scream themselves.

“I won't be able to hold my eyes open,” he said to the doctor and to his mother. “If you want me to hold them open, I'm sorry.”

“I'll hold them open,” the doctor said.

One evening during the week before Christmas, Harvey sat in his wheelchair, alone before the embering fireplace. The owlhead andirons blinked coals at him through their amber eyes, and the dark panels and uprights of the tall room led his eyes upward to the false balcony. No one looked down at him; no De Oestris ghost-paced two dimensionally along that narrow ledge. He was alone in the big house, and even with his third drink in his hand he could not summon any pride in his possession of this great room. That had always been something to count upon, no matter how low he was; perhaps now he had worn out this gift. If he had, what had he left to enjoy? He had come against his will to believe that all men were leaky vessels whose enthusiasms, though they once seemed so bounteous and unending, died away in all the years, and when they were gone nothing could bring them back. Passion did not ever return, and the memory of passion was the most painful of all—much more painful than the memory of inadequacy or dishonor, or even of tragedy. His father's death had seemed, and still seemed, inevitable, sad but not wrong. But this slow death of desire!